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Major Advance in 3D Metal Printing
I just got emails about this earlier today. I have no idea on the cost (I’m waiting for my rep to quote it) and it won’t be released for sale until 2018, but if this tech works out then we’re looking at a truly massive breakthrough in affordable (for businesses anyway, not yet consumers) 3D metal printing. Probably still out of the price range for my business, but this is a significant move towards affordable 3D printing of high-quality metal parts.
First up we have a desktop (really benchtop) metal printing system. Nothing like this has been out before.
Next up we have a high-volume version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUOCiRktuCo
The second video demonstrates the mass printing of an impeller, with an estimated cost of under $5.00 a part. If they are correct, that is a very affordable price.
Amazing.
Published in Technology
Trucking of dense materials is limited by weight, not volume. 40 tons gross per truckload, including the truck and trailer. Commonly 23-25 tons net cargo. Metal cargo is heavy.
It won’t be UPS. It’ll be semi after semi of pallets or totes of powder, with approximately the weight you are currently shipping in.
High quality powdered metal is extraordinarily difficult to produce compared to ingots or castings of alloy, btw. (I’m intimately familiar with the production of precision powdered zinc.) Processes that use metal ingots and/or castings in high volume today aren’t going to switch to 3d printed technologies for decades to come, if ever.
?!?
The two machines pitched in the OP are for prototyping and production in manufacturing. Moore’s Law applies to the manufacture of electronics. What did you think we were discussing?
Whoah here! Judge is not bringing up a straw man at all. You set a single criteria: speed. He’s said that speed doesn’t necessarily matter when you can bring in flexibility, and that’s where the additive manufacturing shines. Let me illustrate with this:
This is a printed metal sculpture from Bathsheba Grossman. This sort of structure is impossible to make either through molding / forging / casting process, or through subtractive processes like milling and routing.
Now this is artwork, a trinket (albeit a mathematically brilliant one), but it is a demonstration of what printing can do – make otherwise impossible shapes.
This is where additive manufacturing shines. When you can run these by the hundreds per batch (now possible per the 2nd video in the OP) then you can make them cheap.
You can also mass-produce or individually produce things that only investment casting could do before, without having to keep making sand casts, molds, forms, or tooling.
You can also make 1 Colt 1911 receiver frame set, then, without making any new tooling, turn around and make yourself a new set of tableware, then round things off with a new light fixture sconce for your hallway.
Home versions.
Good point.
Yes, artwork. Just how useful is this capability for manufactured goods today? Or even to make tooling for the manufacture of goods?
Well, cheaper. Metal powder is not cheap. And short of a non-electronic revolution in the technology of spinning molten metal into a fluidized bed cooling chamber (particle shape control), it isn’t like to get cheap any time soon.
Individually produce competitively, for sure. Limited production runs, likely. Mass produce competitively, I don’t think so. Just on powder cost alone.
Some people will, just for fun. The rest of us won’t, not for 10x to 100x the cost of an equivalent started from an 80% forging or even a blank ingot.
Or even small manufacturing concerns. If you only need a handful of a given part, then you can make that part in house instead of paying for tooling. If you get to the point where you need a flatbed to deliver your metal powder, then sure conventional techniques are the way to go, but smaller scale companies might only need 200 lbs a year.
That’s where I’m curious – the 2nd video has a per-part quote on those impellers of under $5.00. Are they talking machine run time cost only, or does that price include materials?
I’m waiting on my rep to get back to me on the costs of that desktop machine. I will definitely pass that figure on when I get it.
You said in 20 years. What are they going to be doing with these in the meantime to bring the cost down to make them affordable for home use?
As an engineer, I’m prone to giddiness over new technologies and improvements in them — see comment #1. But expectations of revolutions in this or that technology along the lines of the revolution in electronics, simply because the technology is enabled by electronics, crosses the line into fantasy.
I’m old enough to remember people asking the same question about home computers.
I’d expect parts that size and finish to be pennies if cast in large quantities.
Please get the $/lb on the powder and other consumables (binders), and the consumable/powder ratio.
Definitely. I am very curious.
We have 2 Stratasys Mojo printers in our shop now, and those suckers are making ABS production parts for really low volume product lines. Sure some of them would be pennies apiece if molded, but I’d be paying a couple of grand for a mold and would never pay it off at the sales volume.
They’re also making production tooling. I got a quote for one parts rack we made, and to have it conventionally made would have been a thousand bucks per rack, but it costs me maybe $5.00 in time and material. Sure it breaks easily, but that’s OK I just make another. Those printers made it possible for us to use a unique part to save tens of thousands of dollars across all product lines, so the plastics printers have already paid for themselves several times over.
As am I. Helped solder together my first at the age of eleven. Still doesn’t matter. Electronics and the information it carries miniaturizes. Real-world manufactured goods do not.
You’re either younger than I am or your computer had tubes.
Pictures at the link. 1978. I turned 50 a few months ago.
Benjamin Franklin witnessed one of the early Montgolfier brothers hot-air balloon experiments. When one of the other people present said “Of what use is it?” Franklin supposedly retorted “Of what use is a newborn babe?”
First, the capability, then the applications.
Not necessarily. 3D printing would eliminate much of the tooling and equipment needed for manufacturing. Also, it’s one thing to warehouse drums or bins of powdered metals and another altogether to warehouse sheet, plate, tubing, etc. There would be interesting tradeoffs: at this point, it’s cheaper to make one, two, a few locally but slowly. At that point, it’s cheaper to make them in quantity in larger or specialized machinery and ship the finished product.
This. This is another venue for genius. The Steve Jobs/Bill Gates of 3D Metal Printing is out there, or will be. And he will do some awesome stuff.
I am gruntled.
I don’t disagree with that at all. My entire beef was the fantasy that 3d printing will be a revolution in any way comparable to the development of electronics and semiconductors. 3d printing has been slowly and steadily improving for years, and will continue to do so — slowly and steadily. It is useful, but it ain’t a magic wand, and won’t be.
Behold the future.
When I couldn’t turn my bachelor’s degree into remunerative work I spent a year drilling boards in the local door factory. We had four kinds of boards, wide ones and narrow ones in thick and thin. Four holes in the wide boards, two in the thin boards. Two steps down the line someone would hammer a dowel into them, the frame would get routed out, glass added and eventually you’d get a patio door.
Halfway through my tenure at that job we moved the line, and got a new drilling machine to boot. This one was neat; it’d drill the holes, squirt glue in and stick in a dowel all at once. Took a little longer than the old machine, but when you add the dowels it’s a net gain there too.
Thing is, I got the training from the installing tech, and he told me about how you could write programs to put the holes anywhere. Not sure you could do proper milling with it, but you could come close.
We were just using it to replicate the mass production system we had previously. But we weren’t constrained to mass produced product anymore; you get the same speeds and efficiencies producing a thousand units or ony one. I’ve thought a lot about that since. I think the future’s in that direction, where you can make things that are both cheap and unique.
I hope this metal printing works out. It’s another step forward.
The military will have a big impact on reducing the price of the software, materials and machinery. They’ve already deployed and tested in Afghanistan and the Marines are going all in to reduce their supply chain.
This will have a greater impact, and sooner, than driverless cars.
Okay. For those who don’t know, the purpose of 3D printers is to:
They are not cheaper than traditional manufacturing. They are not meant too. They are meant to speed up the design process. Any questions?
Keep in mind that 3D printing was invented in 1987, the year I was born. It’s as old as I am. This technology is not new; what happened is all the patents expired. There are lots of uses for 3D printing and lots of potential market niches, but I don’t think they’re going to revolutionize the manufacturing sector because, well, they already have.
Keep in mind You “absolutely loathe America.”
Sheet, plating, and tubing are very different metallurgically than what you get from powdered sintering processes (the same thing is true of plastics vs injection molding). And while it’s very expensive to make tooling for traditional manufacturing, the final products are much tougher and the quality is higher and more even.
You can make small production runs of plastic parts with RTV silicone molds and cross-linked plastic resin. But the final products won’t be as good as if you used a decent thermoplastic with injection molding. A good thermoplastic is like kudzo: very long, very entangled molecular strands that gives it strength and some flexibility. Cross-linked resins are more like bushes: lots of branching, everything is connected to everything else and the material fractures a lot easier. This is why we no longer use Bakelite (a heavily cross-linked plastic).
Metal has it’s own issues. Sheet metal and the like are processed to increase strength; if you just splash liquid metal on cement to make a sheet it’s not very strong. For example, here’s a YouTube video of forging a gigantic generator shaft. They went to all that trouble because simpler casting processes didn’t produce a good enough material.
Like I said, 3D printing has many uses but competing with traditional manufacturing isn’t one of them.
Well, I wrote a follow-up apology post. . .
Perhaps I should have linked to it in the other one.
Not everything machined from billet etc has to be. Plus CNC machining ain’t cheap and you have a lot of swarf to dispose of.
In many cases MIM would work quite well, but the molds and injection equipment are not cheap either. 3D printing, likewise involving sintered powdered metal, is going to produce parts reasonably similar to MIM. If you’re out at the end of a long logistics chain and now can produce spare parts on demand instead of storing them for future need, that will change a lot of things. Of course, if what you’re 3D printing is mission critical, you now need at least 2 printers in case one goes down…
There are already 3D thermoplastic printers that sinter the plastic. Laser tech seems to be moving fairly fast; it may not be too long before there’s laser sintered 3D metal printing on a commercial scale. That will change things. And you can use a really small beam if you need precision, but it will take longer.
Here’s an interesting one: A slow printer that uses sunlight focused through a Fresnel lens to fuse sand and produce a glass object
What an incredible world. Almost spooky the things man has made it possible to do.
We recently encountered a fellow who worked on the Apollo computer back in the day and now gives talks at the Marconi Museum in Chatham MA. He was rhapsodizing about the 3D ability to make jet engines. I caught it here in the first couple minutes.
Unimaginable that this process will become available to the average guy. Wow.
Skip, I’ve personally never had any parts made with 3-D printing. What kind of tolerencing can I expect? I’m assuming since they’re talking in microns that 3-D can give you tighter tolerences than machined parts. How good and is it shape dependent?
By the way, fascintating. I was taken back when 3-D first came out and thought it was revolutionary then.
Well, there are a couple of niches I can see 3D printing outperforming traditional maching. Low quantity prototypes. You can get a part made over night in your lab if you have a printer. Parts that would normally require multiple pieces because of the machining complexity is another niche. Also if the quantities of 3D could match machining as this new technology shows, I would assume that a lot of cast parts could be replaced with 3D printed parts. And of course, I think 3D parts have an edge when high tolerenced parts are required.
But you’re right, it will never replace CNC machines.